epstein- postmodernism and the left

Postmodernism and the LeftBarbara Epstein

[from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 22, Winter 1997]

Barbara Epstein teaches in the History of Consciousness Department at theUniversity of California-Santa Cruz.

ALAN SOKAL'S HOAX, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a TransformativeHermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which was published in the "Science Wars" issue ofSocial Text,1 and the debate that has followed it, raise important issues for the left. Sokal'sarticle is a parody of postmodernism, or, more precisely, the amalgam of postmodernism,poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism which has come to holdsway in large areas of academia, especially those associated with Cultural Studies. Theseintellectual strands are not always entirely consistent with each other. For instance, thestrong influence of identity politics in this arena seems inconsistent with thepoststructuralist insistence on the instability of all identities. Nevertheless, no one whohas participated in this arena can deny that it is dominated by a specific, highly distinctivesubculture. One knows when one finds oneself in a conference, seminar, or discussiongoverned by this subculture, by the vocabulary that is used, the ideas that are expressed ortaken for granted, and by the fears that circulate, the things that remain unsaid. There aremany critiques of the literature that informs this arena, which can for convenience becalled postmodernism (though the term poststructuralist points more specifically to thedominant theoretical perspective).2 But there is little if any discussion of postmodernismas a subculture.

The subculture of postmodernism is difficult to locate precisely. It is more pervasive inthe humanities than elsewhere, but it has also entered the social sciences. It cannot beentirely identified with any particular discipline, but in some sense constitutes a world ofits own, operating outside of or above disciplinary categories. Within the world ofpostmodernism intellectual trends take hold and fade into oblivion with extraordinaryrapidity. Many of the people who play major roles in shaping it refuse such labels as"postmodernist" (or even "poststructuralist"), on the ground that such categories areconfining.3 The difficulty of defining postmodernism discourages discussion of it as aparticular intellectual arena. Nevertheless it does constitute a subculture. It has increasingreach and power within the university; it has become increasingly insistent that it is theintellectual left.

Many people, inside and outside the world of postmodernism (and for that matter insideand outside the left), have come to equate postmodernism with the left. There are many

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academic departments and programs that associate themselves with progressive politicsin which the subculture of postmodernism holds sway. This is especially the case ininterdisciplinary programs, especially those in the humanities; postmodernism is mostlikely to be the dominant perspective if the institution is relatively prestigious and if thefaculty has been hired since the 60s. These programs tend to draw bright students whoregard themselves as left, progressive, feminist, concerned with racism and homophobia.The result is that many students with this sort of orientation have come to associateprogressive concerns with a postmodernist perspective. Many professors and otherintellectuals, of all political shades, also accept this equation. Left intellectuals whoobject to postmodernism tend to complain in private but remain largely silent in public,largely because they have not learned to speak the postmodernist vocabulary. Theequation of postmodernism with the left poses problems both for the intellectual workconducted under the aegis of postmodernism and for efforts to rebuild the left in the U.S.Alan Sokal's hoax, and the debate that has followed it, provide an opportunity to addressthese issues.

A physicist at NYU, Sokal was inspired to write a parody of postmodernism two yearsago, having read Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's book, Higher Superstition: TheAcademic Left and Its Quarrels with Science,4 which describes attacks on science, and onconcepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities. Sokal is a leftist, and wasparticularly upset that these attacks were being made in the name of left and feministpolitics. He was also taken aback by the apparently intentional obscurity of the languagein which these attacks were being made. At first Sokal found it difficult to believe that thestatements quoted by Gross and Levitt could be representative of any significant trend.However in checking the quotes he found that these were not isolated instances but partof a growing and apparently influential literature. Believing that mockery would be thebest way of combatting this trend, Sokal wrote an article that begins with the followingstatement:

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue toreject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and culturalcriticism can have anything to contribute, expect perhaps peripherally, totheir research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the veryfoundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of suchcriticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the longpost-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, whichcan be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an independent world,whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeedof humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in eternal physicallaws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect andtentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the objective procedures andepistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method. 5

The article presents what is described as a review of developments in quantum gravity,and claims that this research justifies the conclusion that physical reality, no less thansocial reality, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific knowledge, far


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from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations ofthe culture that produced it. In the article Sokal extensively cites real research but(according to his subsequent critique of his own article) exaggerates and distorts itsimplications. His article consists of assertions that are backed up, not by evidence orcareful argument, but by appeals to authorities -- the postmodern masters, Derrida,Irigaray, Lacan, Aronowitz, and others, whose vacuous remarks on quantum gravity andother areas of science Sokal quotes as if they were authoritative. Sokal makes vaguestatements implying some connection between scientific discoveries and the need for vastchanges in thinking in other areas. For instance, Sokal claims that general relativity callsfor new ways of thinking about time, space and causality not only in the physical realmbut in philosophy, literary criticism, and the human sciences. He supports this point by aquote from Jean Hyppolite:

With Einstein...we see the end of a kind of privilege of empiric evidence.And in that connection we see a constant appear, a constant which is acombination of time-space, which does not belong to any of the experimentswho live the experience, but which, in a way, dominates the whole construct;and this notion of the constant -- is this the center? (p. 221)

Sokal responds to Hyppolite's question with a quote from Derrida, which he describes asgoing to the heart of classical general relativity:

The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the veryconcept of variability -- it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words,it is not the concept of something -- of a center starting from which anobserver could master the field -- but the very concept of the game. (p. 221)

Further on, Sokal quotes Lacan on the importance of differential topology:

This diagram [the mobius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort ofessential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject.This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can searchfor the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps seethat the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Kleinbottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity isvery important as it explains many things about the structure of mentaldisease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the sameway one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject,and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.

Sokal adds: "As Althusser rightly commented, Lacan finally gives Freud"s thinking thescientific concepts that it requires." (p.224)

After what he presents as a review of research in the field of quantum gravity (and inrelated areas of science and mathematics) Sokal goes on to claim that in order to have atruly liberatory science, it is not sufficient to dispose of the outdated view that there issuch a thing as objective reality. One must also subordinate science to progressive


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politics. In elaborating this point Sokal first quotes Andrew Ross that we need a sciencethat will be publically answerable and of some service to progressive interests. This is areasonable remark, tangentially related to Sokal's point, but not a call for subordinatingscience to politics. Sokal then presents a quote from Kelly Oliver.

In order to be revolutionary, feminist theory cannot claim to describe whatexists, or, natural facts. Rather, feminist theories should be political tools,strategies for overcoming oppression in specific concrete situations. Thegoal, then, of feminist theory, should be to develop strategic theories -- nottrue theories, not false theories, but strategic theories. (p.227)

In approvingly quoting this remark, and linking it to Ross' comment about the importanceof science serving progressive goals, Sokal makes the leap from a call for a sociallyresponsible science to a call for an approach that sets aside questions of truth or falsehoodand is driven by already given political goals.

Sokal submitted his article to Social Text, which accepted it for their "Science Wars"issue. After his article had been accepted but had not yet appeared, Sokal began workingon a piece disclosing his own hoax and explaining why he had felt that it was necessaryto mock postmodernism in order to save the left from its own silliness. Sokal wanted tofind humanists critical of postmodernism, like him, from a left/feminist perspective, tocomment on his piece. Through a string of associations he was led to me. I beganworking with him on the piece in which he disclosed his own hoax. At that point Sokalwanted to allow some time to elapse between the publication of his hoax and hisdisclosure. He wanted to see how long it would take for someone to discover his hoax. If,after a few months, no one had caught it, he intended to send his self-disclosure to SocialText with a request that they publish it.

The course of events went differently. While the article was in press, an enterprisingfree-lance journalist, David Glenn, overheard a remark (made, presumably, by one of theby this time fairly large circle of people who knew of Sokal's hoax) which led him tobelieve that a scandal was brewing within Social Text. Some skillful investigation ledGlenn to the page proofs of Social Text's forthcoming issue. It seemed to Glenn, onreading Sokal's article, that even for the world of Cultural Studies this was a bit extreme.Glenn contacted Sokal and asked him if the article was a hoax. Sokal acknowledged thatit was and congratulated Glenn on his detective work. The two took the story to LinguaFranca, whose editors offered to publish a statement by Sokal in their forthcoming issue,disclosing his own hoax and explaining why he had done it.

The result was that the "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, with Sokal's article, appearedin mid-April of 1996, and Lingua Franca, with Sokal's statement about his article, abouta week later. The story was picked up by the media. On May 17 there was a story aboutSokal's hoax on the front page of the New York Times. After that the story spread; articlesabout it appeared not only in newspapers throughout the U.S. but in Europe and LatinAmerica. Probably no one concerned with postmodernism has remained unaware of it.People have been bitterly divided. Some are delighted, some are enraged. One friend of


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mine told me that Sokal's article came up in a meeting of a left reading group that hebelongs to. The discussion became polarized between impassioned supporters and equallyimpassioned opponents of Sokal; it nearly turned into a shouting match. The astonishingthing about this, my friend said, was that actually no one had read the article, because thatissue of Social Text had sold out so quickly. Members of this group knew about the articleonly from having read accounts of it in the press, or from discussions with others whohad read it. Clearly Sokal's article has brought to the surface intensely felt divisions,raising the question: what are these differences about?

Some of us who were delighted by Sokal's hoax, at one time had a more positive view ofpostmodernism. The constellation of trends that I am calling postmodernism has itsorigins in the writings of a group of French intellectuals of the 60s, most preeminentlyMichel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Fran‡ois Lyotard. Those whodeveloped postmodernism tended to be associated with the radicalism of the 60s, and tosee May '68 as a formative moment in their intellectual and political development. Frenchpostmodernism expressed many aspects of the ethos of May '68: its anti-authoritarianism,its rejection of Marxism and view of it as implicated in unacceptable structures ofauthority, its celebration of the imagination and resistance to all constraints.6

In addition to being shaped by the politics of May '68 (including the French CommunistParty's betrayal of the student movement and support for the authorities), Frenchpostmodernism developed out of the debates that were taking place in French intellectualcircles at that time. It included a rejection of humanism, in particular of Sartre's view ofthe self as the center of political resistance and his quest for an integrated, authenticselfhood. Postmodernism rejected aspects of the structuralist legacy, particularly itsemphasis on the stability of social structures but retained its focus on language, the viewthat language provides the categories that shape self, society. This could be extended tothe view that all reality is shaped by language; it could suggest that language is real,everything else, constructed or derived from it. Such an approach could suggest a critiqueof social analysis or radical politics emphasizing the economic level, or overt structuresof political power. It could suggest the need for a critique of culture and a call for culturaltransformation.

POSTMODERNISM ENTERED THE U.S. IN THE LATE 70S AND EARLY 80S, by a number ofroutes simultaneously. There were academics, especially philosophers and literary critics,who were drawn to poststructuralist philosophy. Many feminists and gay and lesbianactivists became interested in the work of Michel Foucault, whose attention to the socialconstruction of sexuality, view of power as dispersed through society, and insistence onthe connection between power and knowledge, intersected with their own concerns.Foucault's work seemed to provide a theoretical ground for shifting the focus of radicalanalysis away from macrostructures such as the economy and the state, and toward dailylife, ideology, social relations and culture. Foucault's view of state power as alwaysrepressive and his identification of resistance with the marginalized and suppressed madesense at a time when radical struggles were being led by groups peripheral to mainstreamculture and power relations, such as disaffected youth and women, blacks and other racialminorities, gays and lesbians.


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The attractiveness of postmodernism, in the late 70s and early 80s, had something to dowith the cultural and political currents with which it was associated. It was looselyaffiliated with avant-garde trends in architecture and art, and also with the impulse ofmany intellectuals to set aside the old distinction between high and low culture and begintaking popular culture seriously. Poststructuralist theory emphasized flux, instability,fragmentation, and questioned the validity of claims to authenticity and truth. Theseconcerns overlapped with emerging themes in popular culture: distraction, absence ofrootedness in the past, a sense of meaninglessness. More important, thesepoststructuralist, or postmodernist, concerns spoke to levels of reality that seemedincreasingly salient and that more conventional theories, including left theories, did notaddress. Postmodernism seemed to refer to a set of cultural changes that were takingplace around us (and within us) as much as it referred to a literature or set of theoriesabout those changes. The increasing use of the term poststructuralism to refer to a set oftheories in part grew out of the need to distinguish between theory and the culturalrealities to which it responded.

In the latter part of the 70s, many young people whose center of attention was shiftingfrom the movements of the 60s to intellectual work, often in the academy, were avidlyreading Foucault. Many were also reading other French intellectuals, including Frenchfeminist such as Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, the eclectic theorists of society andpsychology, Gilles DeLeuze and Felix Guattari, the Marxist structuralist, Louis Althusser,the psychoanalytic structuralist, Jacques Lacan. Through the works of these writers andthe debates in which their work was embedded, the poststructuralist ideas that had cometo dominate French radical intellectual circles in the late 60s and 70s filtered into parallelintellectual circles in the U.S. By the early 80s an intellectual subculture was emerging inthe U.S. which tended to use the term "postmodernism" to describe its outlook. Though itwas located primarily in the university, it had links to avant-garde developments in artand architecture and a strong interest in experimental trends in popular culture.Postmodernists tended to feel strong sympathies for feminism and for gay and lesbianmovements, and were especially drawn to a politics that was tinged with anarchism andoriented toward spectacle -- a politics that happened to be quite salient in a cluster ofmovements that emerged in the U.S. around the late 70s and early 80s.

The excitement of postmodernism, certainly in the early 80s and to some degree throughthe decade, had to do with its links to vital cultural and political movements, and the factthat it was pointing to rapid changes in culture and examining these through thepoststructuralist categories of language, text, discourse. Through the 80s, original andprovocative books and articles appeared, loosely associated with a postmodernistperspective or at least addressing questions raised by postmodernism. Though everyonewould have a different list, most would no doubt include James Clifford's ThePredicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, DonnaHaraway's Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science,Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards aRadical Democratic Politics, Jean Beaudrillard's For a Critique of The Political Economyof the Sign, Jacques Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition.7


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Others examined postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon and criticized from a broadlyMarxist perspective. Works in this vein would include David Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity, Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a SociallySymbolic Act (and his influential article, "Postmodernism, or the Logic of LateCapitalism.")8 In the 80s and 90s a great deal of European postmodernist (orpoststructuralist) literature was being published in English, and was widely read in theU.S. In fact, postmodernist books by European authors may have been read more widelyin the U.S. than in their authors' home countries, since by this time interest inpostmodernism had faded considerably in France and elsewhere in Europe. DESPITE THEATTRACTIONS OF POSTMODERNISM, SOME OF US WERE UNEASY about it from the start.Postmodernism not only pointed to processes of flux, fragmentation, the disenchantmentor draining of meaning from social life, but tended to be fascinated with them. It oftenseemed that postmodernists could see nothing but instability, and that a new set of valueswas being established without ever being acknowledged, according to which the shiftingand unstable was always preferable to the unified or integrated. Despite the brilliance ofmuch of the literature there seemed at times to be a kind of flatness of vision, a tendencyto insist on one set of qualities while refusing to recognize their necessary counterparts,as if one could have up without down, hot without cold. There seemed to be a celebrationof the fragmentation of self and society that ignored the need for balance, for new level ofcoherence. Not that all writers who addressed the questions posed by postmodernism fellinto this trap. But on the whole those who escaped it were those who addressed questionsraised by postmodernism rather than adopting it as their own perspective.

By the late 80s and early 90s, postmodernism seemed to have been taken over by thepursuit of the new or avant-garde. Radicalism became identified with criticism for thesake of criticism, and equated with intellectual or cultural sophistication. Theaestheticization of postmodernism corresponded to the attenuation of its ties with anyactual social movements, as the movements with which postmodernism had felt thegreatest rapport shrivelled. Postmodernism had always been pulled between the agendasof the academy and the social movements; the agenda of the academy now took over.Politics became increasingly a matter of gestures or proclamations. By the 90s, the questfor success in an increasingly harsh and competitive academic world became the drivingforce. Claims to radicalism, oddly, seemed to serve this purpose.

ONE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING POSTMODERNISM IS TO SAY THAT THERE ARE strong andweak, or more ambitious and more restrained versions of it. According to the strongversion, there is no such thing as truth. Because all perception of reality is mediated,because what we regard as reality is perceived through discourse, there is no truth, thereare only truth claims. Since there is nothing against which these claims can be measured,they all have the same standing. Another way of putting this would be that there isnothing prior to interpretation or theory, nothing that stands outside of interpretation andcan be taken as a basis for judging its validity. In the postmodernist or poststructuralistlexicon, the terms "essentialism" and "foundationalism" are used to denote a host ofpresumably bad attitudes, including the view that interpretation or theory can and shouldbe judged in relation to some reality external to itself, the view that some social groupshave characteristics or interests that are given rather than continually constructed and


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reconstructed -- and reductionism, stereotyping, as in the view that all women arenurturent, or that African Americans have innate musical abilities. The fact that the termessentialism refers simultaneously to an epistemological approach and also to racist,sexist or at least naive politics tends to link these two and makes it difficult to have acalm discussion of whether there is such a thing as truth, and whether theory should bejudged by reality external to itself. In many discussions the use of the term "essentialist"is enough to identify the philosophical stance as politically retrograde and thereforeunacceptable.

Those of us who disagree with the strong postmodernist position do not object to thepremise that our perception of reality is mediated. What we object to is the leap of logicbetween this premise and the conclusion that there is no truth, that all claims have equalstatus. We would argue that although we do not possess ultimate truth and never will, it isnevertheless possible to expand our understanding, and it is worth the effort to gain moreknowledge -- even if that knowledge is always subject to revision. This version of thestrong postmodernist position is -- in my experience -- rarely explicitly argued in theliterature; it is in discussion (in conferences, seminars, and private conversations) that oneencounters it. It is often posed against a straw-person argument that would claim that thetruth is readily accessible, completely transparent, unaffected by culture. This straw-person argument is used as a foil, to excuse the implausibility and logical weakness of thestrong postmodernist view. On the whole postmodernist literature, instead of arguing thisposition explicitly, assumes an attitude of radical skepticism toward truth, or towardclaims that there is an objective reality that is to some extent knowable, without everclearly defining the grounds for this skepticism.

The strong position, as it appears in postmodernist or poststructuralist writing, tends totake the form of an extreme social constructionism, a view that identities, relations,political positions are constructed entirely through interpretation, that there is noidentifiable social reality against which interpretations can be judged, no ground inmaterial or social reality that places any constraints on the formation of identities orperspectives. Joan Scott, for instance, in her influential article "Experience," argues thatany account of experience takes for granted categories and assumptions that ought to bequestioned, that to accept the category of experience, or to use the word withoutdistancing oneself from it by surrounding it with quotation marks, is dangerous, andopens the way to essentialism and foundationalism. Scott admits that the concept ofexperience is too deeply embedded in culture to be done away with easily. In the end shesuggests that we retain it but treat it with suspicion.9

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,apply the same approach to the formation of political positions. They argue that allpolitical identities or perspectives are constructed, that there is no particular relationbetween class position, for instance, and political stance. In support of this, they arguethat workers are not automatically socialist or even progressive: often they supportright-wing politics. Laclau and Mouffe are of course correct that there is no automaticconnection between class and politics, or between the working class and socialism, butthis does not mean that there is no connection between the two, that all interpretations or


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constructions of class interest are equally possible and equally valid. For instance, it ishard to imagine a situation in which a socialist program, proposed by the capitalist class,was defeated by working-class opposition. Laclau and Mouffe make their argument bysetting up a straw argument (that workers are automatically socialist -- a view held by noone that I know of), knocking it down, and substituting a position that is equally extreme,namely that there is no connection at all between class position and political perspective.Without this straw economism as a foil, the problems of the extreme socialconstructionist argument become more apparent.10

An even more extreme example of strong postmodernism is Judith Butler's argument, inher book Gender Trouble,11 that sexual difference is socially constructed. Butler acceptsFoucault's now widely accepted view that gender is socially constructed; she goes beyondthis and criticizes Foucault for his unwillingness to extend an anti-essentialist perspectiveto sexuality itself. She argues that not only gender but sex itself, that is, sexual difference,should be seen as an effect of power relations and cultural practices, as constructed"performatively" -- that is, by acts whose meaning is determined by their cultural context.Butler argues that the conventional view of sex as consisting of two given, biologicallydetermined categories, male and female, is ideological, and defines radical politics asconsisting of parodic performances that might undermine what she calls "naturalizedcategories of identity." Her assertion that sexual difference is socially constructed strainsbelief. It is true that there are some people whose biological sex is ambiguous, but this isnot the case for the vast majority of people. Biological difference has vast implications,social and psychological; the fact that we do not yet fully understand these does not meanthat they do not exist. Butler's understanding of radicalism shows how the meaning of theword has changed in the postmodernist arena. It no longer has to do with efforts toachieve a more egalitarian society. It refers to the creation of an arena in which theimagination can run free. It ignores the fact that only a privileged few can play at takingup and putting aside identities.

There is a weak, or restrained, version of postmodernism which is much more plausiblethan the strong version described above. This version argues that language and cultureplay a major and often unrecognized role in shaping society, that things are oftenregarded as natural which are actually socially constructed. This is a valid and importantperspective. Those of us on the left who criticize postmodernism reject the strong version,not this more restrained approach. The difference between the two lies in the excessiveambition, and the consequent reductionism, of the strong approach, and the greatermodesty or caution of the weak or restrained approach. Strong postmodernism is culturalreductionism: it represents the ambition to make culture the first or only level ofexplanation. It is no better to argue that everything can be understood in terms of cultureor language than to argue that everything is driven by economic forces, or by the questfor political power. The project that frames postmodernism is the critique ofEnlightenment rationality; there are aspects of that tradition that deserve to be criticized,such as the tendency to take the white male as the model of rational subjectivity, and theequation of truth with the discoveries of Western science, excluding other contributions.But the postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment is one-sided. It forgets that a


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universalist view of humanity was a major (and only partially accomplished) step awayfrom narrow nationalisms, and that the concept of truth is a weapon in the hands ofprogressive social movements, that they rely on opposing the truth of oppression tohollow official claims that society is just.

THE PROBLEMS OF POSTMODERNISM THAT I HAVE NAMED, and more, have been displayedin the public response to the Sokal article. The first response was from Stanley Fish,Professor of English at Duke University and a leading figure in the field of CulturalStudies. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, "Professor Sokal's Bad Joke,"12 Fishtried to shift the terrain of the debate from postmodernism to the social sciences,suggesting that the field of Science Studies consists of scholars whose modest aim is toinvestigate the ideas that drive scientific research. The work of these scholars, he implied,hardly goes beyond the bounds of conventional sociology. In this article, Fish appearednot to have noticed the more extreme positions that have been taken in the name ofpostmodernism or Cultural Studies, inside or outside the field of Science Studies. It ishard not to see Fish's piece as a strategic move, a slide to the weak or restrained positionwhen the strong position has begun to look foolish.

The next piece to appear was a statement in Lingua Franca, by Andrew Ross and BruceRobbins, editors of Social Text.13 Robbins and Ross wrote that they had regarded Sokal'sarticle as "a little hokey" and "not their cup of tea" but that they published it to encouragea natural scientist who appeared to be interested in Cultural Studies. Next, Tikkunpublished an article by Bruce Robbins,14 who wrote that the editors of Social Text hadpublished the article because of the merit they saw in its argument. Robbins asked whatconclusions should be drawn and what should not be drawn from the fact that Social Texthad published Sokal's piece. One conclusion not to draw, he wrote, is that postmodernistscan't recognize an unintelligible argument when they see one.

When Sokal said his essay was nonsense, most reporters instantly followedhis lead. After all, he should know, right? But we thought Sokal had a realargument, and we still do. Allow me to quote Paul Horgan, senior writer atScientific American, summarizing in the July 16 New York Times: Sokal,Horgan says, "proposed that superstring theory might help liberate sciencefrom dependence upon the concept of objective truth.'" Prof. Sokal laterannounced that the article had been a hoax, intended to expose thehollowness of postmodernism. In fact, however, superstring theory is exactlythe kind of science that subverts conventional notions of truth.(p.58)

Robbins went on to argue that the concept of truth is questionable on political grounds:

Does subverting conventional notions of truth really have anything to dowith being politically progressive?...Is it in the interests of women, African-Americans, and other super-exploited people to insist that truth and identityare social constructions? Yes and no. No, you can't talk about exploitationwithout respect for empirical evidence and a universal standard of justice.But yes, truth can be another source of oppression. It was not so long ago


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that scientists gave their full authority to explanations of why women andAfrican-Americans (not to speak of gays and lesbians) were inherentlyinferior or pathological or both. Explanations like these continue to appear innewer and subtler forms. Hence there is a need for a social constructionistcritique of knowledge.(p.59)

Here we have an argument that has become hopelessly tangled, perhaps through the effortto see everything through a postmodernist lens while refusing to acknowledge thatpostmodernism is a lens, that it is anything other than pure Truth. Robbins is of courseright that some people say things about African Americans, women, etc., that are not true.This does not mean that we should reject the concept of truth. It means that we shouldreject false assertions.

Robbins goes on to deride critics of postmodernism as "know-nothings of the left [who]delude themselves: Capitalism is screwing people! What goes up must come down! Whatelse do we need to know?" Robbins continues, "It seems likely that what is reallyexpressed by the angry tirades against cultural politics that have accompanied the Sokalaffair is a longing for the days when women were back in the kitchen and it wasrespectable to joke about faggots and other natural objects of humor. These are not thefamily values I want my children to learn." (p.59) Presumably Robbins is referring topeople who have expressed support for Sokal, such as Ruth Rosen (a feminist historian),Katha Pollitt (a feminist journalist), Jim Weinstein (editor of In These Times), MichaelAlbert (editor of Z Magazine), myself. Robbins' remark is self-righteous posturing, andunfortunately it is not an isolated example. In the arena of postmodernism, left politics isoften expressed through striking poses, often conveying moral superiority, greatersophistication, or both. There often seems to be a sneer built into postmodernistdiscourse, a cooler-than-thou stance. This enrages the critics of postmodernism, and it isone reason why it has been so difficult for supporters and critics of Sokal to discuss theirdifferences calmly.

THERE ARE SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITHIN THE POSTMODERNIST SUBCULTURE. There is anintense ingroupyness, a concern with who is in and who is out, and an obscurantistvocabulary whose main function often seems to be to mark those on the inside and allowthem to feel that they are part of an intellectual elite. This is not to object to the use of atechnical vocabulary where it is needed to express ideas precisely. The world ofpostmodernism has unfortunately come to be flooded with writing in whichpretentiousness reigns and intellectual precision appears to have ceased to be aconsideration. There is the fetishization of the new: the rapid rise and fall of trends, thecollective deference to them while they last. For a while it seemed that every debate inthis arena entailed accusations of essentialism. The exact definition of essentialism wasnever clear, but it nevertheless seemed that essentialism was the source of all error, andthe use of the term as invective was enough to halt discussion. There is the inflation oflanguage and the habit of self-congratulation: it has become common practice in thisarena to advertise one's own work as radical, subversive, transgressive. All this reallymeans is that one hopes one is saying something new. There is the worship of celebrities.This is a culture that encourages and rewards self-aggrandizement and grandiosity. There


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is intellectual bullying, the use of humiliation, ridicule, implicit threats of ostracism, tosilence dissent. All of this stands in direct contrast to the endless talk of difference thattakes place in this arena.

Efforts to raise criticisms from within this arena have not had much effect; those whohave made such efforts have been treated with hostility or at best ignored. Those of uswho supported Sokal's hoax felt that a public act of mockery was required to open updiscussion. Now that postmodernism has lost its aura of invincibility people have begunto laugh, and it does not seem likely that the laughter will stop anytime soon. Forinstance, in a review of a book entitled Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the MaleBody on the Line, by Calvin Thomas (University of Illinois Press), reviewer Daniel Harriswrites,

In the fast-paced intellectual environment of postmodern cultural studies, theline between ostensibly serious scholarship and outright parody is not justthin but, in many instances, nonexistent, as became embarrassingly evidentlast month to the editors of one of the house organs of contemporarytheoretical discourse, Social Text....One can only hope that Sokal's brilliantact of intellectual terrorism...will be the first of many similar practical jokes.If even a handful of the numerous critics of cultural theory did their part,postmodern journals and academic presses would be swamped withfraudulent manuscripts that would shatter the self-confidence of the entirefield. This vast industry would collapse into a state of total disarray were itstightly-knit ranks to become infiltrated by jargon-spewing moles posing asthe real McCoy, double agents cloaked in the uniform of the Americanuniversity's elitist new brand of paper radicals.

Harris goes on to speculate that the book under review must be another hoax. How else,he asks, can one explain the bewildering statements that appear in this book, such as:

The excrementalization of alterity as the site/sight of homelessness, of utteroutsideness and unsubiatable dispossession figure(s) in...Hegel'smetanarrational conception of Enlightenment modernity as the teleologicalprocess of totalization leading to absolute knowing.

The anal penis...function(s) within a devalued metonmymic continuity,whereas the notion of the phallomorphic turd functions within the realm ofmetaphorical substitution.

If the bodily in masculinity is encountered in all its rectal gravity, thespecular mode by which others become shit is disrupted.

Harris suggests that if Thomas wants to become an academic success he should followSokal's example and proclaim his book to be a prank. Only slightly less tongue in cheek,he speculates that what he describes as the central metaphor of this book, the comparisonof writing to "productions" of the body, especially shit, may be apt in a field in whichjargon is used as an offensive weapon, to score points against competitors in the battle for


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tenure and prestige.15

POSTMODERNISM DID NOT INVENT INTELLECTUAL BULLYING. This is not the first instanceof dogmatism on the left. In the 30s people on the left (at least those in or close to theCommunist Party) felt considerable pressure not to admit, or even consider thepossibility, that the Soviets were anything less than angels. In the late 60s a kind ofMaoist politics swept the left, in particular the radical core of the anti-war movement.Under the aegis of "Marxism-Leninism" a politics was put forward that revolved aroundthe assumption that revolution was possible in the U.S. if only people on the left wouldfollow the example set by revolutionaries in the Third World. Strategies were proposedthat were utterly inappropriate to the U.S.; questioning these strategies, or for that mattersuggesting that a revolution was not very likely in the U.S., was tantamount to labellingoneself a defector from the cause. Similar things took place in the radical wing of thewomen's movement: extreme conceptions of feminism, such as the belief that havinganything to do with men amounted to fraternizing with the enemy, took hold in manycircles, and questioning these ideas was likely to earn one a reputation as a friend of thepatriarchy. The left in the U.S. seems prone to being seized by ideas which, whenrecollected a few years later, look somewhat mad. But it is worth asking why particularideologies take over at particular moments. After all, in the case of postmodernism, it isnot clear why culturalism, a social constructionism set in competition with other levels ofsocial analysis, should be equated with radicalism.

Terry Eagleton, in his article "Where Do Postmodernists Come From?"16 argues that leftintellectuals in the U.S. have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badlydefeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, heargues, involves an extreme subjectivism, a view of the intellect as all-powerful, amindset that might be described as taking the May '68 slogan "all power to theimagination" literally, combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth theeffort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can'tbe changed anyway.

I would add two points to Eagleton's analysis. First, postmodernism takes many of itsideas from the 60s. To some extent it represents a rigidification of ideas that werewidespread in movements of that time, especially the voluntarism or hubris of agenerational cohort that tended to think that it could accomplish anything. Thewidespread view among leftists of the 60s that revolution was waiting in the wings, andthe fact that so few people openly challenged this, reflected a grandiosity, a loosening ofthe collective grip on reality. In the heated atmosphere of the late 60s it was possible forradicals to take fairly crazy positions without utterly losing their audience or becomingirrelevant to politics. In the 90s there is considerably less room for extreme voluntarism,or grandiosity, cast as a political position.

There was also a widespread tendency in the movements of the 60s to equate personaland cultural change with broader social change. One of the most important contributionsof the movements of the 60s (especially feminism and the countercultural left) was thecritique of a culture that promoted consumerism, that equated happiness with individual


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striving for power and wealth. But in rejecting a politics that left this element out it waseasy to fall into the opposite problem of believing that creating communities in whichpeople tried to live according to different values would inevitably move society as awhole in the same direction. This made change seem easier than it was. The prosperity ofthe late 60s and early 70s allowed alternative communities to flourish, and it seemedplausible that the more egalitarian relationships and humane values developed in themmight serve as models. But as it turned out the egalitarian impulse that found expressionin these communities was overshadowed by the shift to the right that has taken place inAmerican society as a whole since the mid- to late 70s. Alternative communitiesthemselves were weakened and destroyed by social changes over which they had nocontrol, especially the depression of the 70s and the withdrawal of support from thepublic sector in the 80s and 90s. In the 90s it would be very hard to make a convincingcase that cultural change equals social change. The equation of the personal or thecultural with the political was a mixed blessing for the movements of the 60s. In the 90sit tends to mean retreating into one's own community and allowing politics to drift furtherand further to the right.

POSTMODERNISM SUFFERS NOT ONLY FROM ITS RELIANCE ON a conception of radicalismthat made more sense in the 60s than it does now, but also from the fact that it is locatedin academia and reflects its pressures. The logic of the market is not a new presence in theAmerican academy, but it now seems to be sweeping all other values and considerationsaside. There has been a dramatic increase in the pressures toward intellectualspecialization and a frantic pace of publication. There is intense competition between andwithin fields. In the years following World War II there was a widespread belief, ingovernment and business circles, that the U.S. economy would benefit if a broad liberalhigher education were widely available. In the wake of Sputnik there was a sudden rushof support for science education; this resulted in more government support foruniversities without diminishing its commitment to the humanities. Through the 60s itwas mostly the children of the white middle class who attended universities, public orprivate. Since the 60s the economy has changed, the values governing public spendinghave changed, and the composition of university student bodies has changed. In a societyincreasingly stratified between haves and have-nots, an economy in which technicalexpertise seems more important than familiarity with history and literature, support forliberal education is hardly reliable.

In the 50s and 60s academics could believe that their profession was held in high esteem.They were well paid, and at least some found their opinions sought by the White Houseor by large corporations. Over the last few decades it has become harder to believe thatpublic esteem of the academy is unqualified. The loss of prestige (and of resources) is feltmost sharply in the humanities. In the 50s the social sciences tried to show that they couldbe as rigorous, quantitative, and ostensibly value-free, as the natural sciences. Thisencouraged huge quantities of unimaginative, narrowly-conceived, jargon-ridden papers.Now it seems to be the turn of the humanities to try to raise their stock within academia,though this time the strategy is not to imitate science but to assert the supremacy of avocabulary and theoretical perspective nurtured in the humanities over all fields ofknowledge. But postmodernism only highlights its own weaknesses when it overreaches


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its scope. I have heard many postmodernists denounce Sokal on grounds that his hoaxcould lead to funds being withdrawn from Cultural Studies or the humanities generally. Itseems more useful to look at postmodernism's internal problems. Sokal's hoax and thelaughter it generated shows that the field had become ripe for parody.17

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS FOR THE LEFT? As restraints on capitalism haveloosened and the logic of the market has crept into virtually every area of life, the morehuman values of the left have come to seem archaic and irrelevant. We certainly need acritique of this culture. But postmodernism is not that critique. There are too manyrespects in which postmodernism accepts or revels in the values of the marketplace for itto serve as a critique. On a deeper level the problem is that postmodernism is a stance ofpure criticism, that it avoids making any claims, asserting any values (or acknowledgingits own implicit system of values, in particular its orientation toward sophistication andaesthetics). Left politics requires a conception of a better society and an assertion of abetter set of values than those that now prevail. This does not mean that any particularvision of society or any particular definition of those values is the last word; a leftperspective requires ongoing discussion and debate. But it is not possible for a purelycritical stance to serve as the basis for left politics.

No doubt, one reason that postmodernism has taken hold so widely is that it is mucheasier to be critical than to present a positive vision. Being on the left means having aconception of the future and confidence that there is a connection between the present andthe future, that collective action in the present can lead to a better society. It is difficultthese days to articulate any clear vision of the future, even more difficult to figure outhow we might get from where we are to a more humane, egalitarian, and ecologicallybalanced society. A friend of mine recently told me that her image is that we are on a logthat is slowly drifting down the Niagara River, and we can begin to hear the roar of theFalls. But because we do not know what to do, we are not roused from our lethargy. Itseems to me that postmodernism has become an obstacle to addressing urgent issues,including impending environmental and social disasters, and how to build a movementthat might begin to address them. Clearing away the fog won't automatically provide uswith any answers, but might make it easier to hold a productive discussion.

NOTES

Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a TransformativeHermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text 46-47, Spring/Summer 1996:217-252. return

1.

For critiques of postmodernism, or poststructuralist theory, see Brian Palmer,Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of SocialHistory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Peter Dews, Logics ofDisintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory(London: Verso, 1987), Alex Callinocos, Against Post-Modernism (London:Methuen, 1982); Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice

2.


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(London: Methuen, 1982), and Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory(London: Pinter, 1988), Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford:Blackwell, 1996), Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism(London: Verso, 1984), and Somer Broberibb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A FeministCritique of Postmodernism (North Melbourne: Spiniflex Press, 1992). return

See, for instance, Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and theQuestion of Postmodernism'", 3-21, in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. JudithButler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992). return

3.

Paul Gross and Normal Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and itsQuarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994). return

4.

Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a TransformativeHermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text 46-47 (Spring/Summer 1996), p.217. return

5.

See Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, French Philosophy of the 60s: An Essay onAntihumanism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985) on the ways inwhich poststructuralism and the spirit of May '68 coincided, and differed. Ferry andRenault point out that while a politics of authenticity, of the self as agent of socialchange, was central to May '68, poststructuralism emphasizes fragmentation andincoherence to the point of denying the existence of the self and the possibility ofauthenticity. return

6.

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,Literature, and Art ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), Donna Haraway,Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (NewYork: Routledge, 1989), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony andSocialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985),Jean Beaudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis,Telos Press, 1981), Jacques Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1984). return

7.

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins ofCultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Frederic Jameson, The PoliticalUnconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1981), and "Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism," first publishedin New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984): 53-92, later included in Jameson'sbook of the same title (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). return

8.

Joan W. Scott, "Experience," in Feminists Theorize the Political, (New York:Routledge, 1992), ed. Judith Butler and Joan W, Scott: 22-40. return

9.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London:Verso, 1985), pp. 82-85. return

10.


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Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (NewYork: Routledge, 1990). return

11.

Stanley Fish, "Professor Sokal's Bad Joke," New York Times, Op Ed, May 21, 1996.return

12.

"Mystery Science Theater," Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, Co-Editors, ofSocial Text, Lingua Franca, July/August 1996: 54-57. return

13.

Bruce Robbins, "Anatomy of a Hoax," Tikkun Vol. 11, No. 5, September-October1996, pp. 58-59. return

14.

Daniel Harris, "Jargon Basement," review of Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety,and the Male Body on the Line, by Calvin Thomas (University of Illinois Press).Bay Area Reporter, June 13, 1996, p. 40. return

15.

Terry Eagleton, "Where Do Postmodernists Come From?" Monthly Review Vol. 47,No. 3, July-August 1995, Special Issue: "In Defense of History: Marxism and thePostmodern Agenda," pp. 59-70. return

16.

For a discussion of the public view of academics and how postmodernism hasmade a bad situation worse, see Loic J.D. Wacquant, "The Self-InflictedIrrelevance of American Academics," Academe, July-August 1996, 18-23. return

17.

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